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Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

If Hyatt is concerned about shrinking elite rolls then they need to change qualifying requirements. They’ve managed to push aside every elite that didn’t already stay 50+nights/year…and even those are complaining about the 60 night requirement. WOH is a complete joke for 97% of frequent travelers. Offering status match challenges is not them showing concern about losing elites, merely that they’re trying to grow their ranks the same way they did in the past.

Didn’t last year’s status match to (then) Diamond-level cause mass discord because of the increase in Diamonds… which led to the World of Hyatt program restrictions… which caused a perceived decrease in the Globalist community… which led to this year’s status match…

Wait… what?

Can someone fire the entire Hyatt Marketing Department and roll back the Globalist changes? What is going on at Hyatt? And yes… I’m struggling to make 60 stays so far…

If this status challenge (or is it a match?) is indeed for real, WoH will be no better than HGP because it will mean that the program managers learned nothing from their most recent debacle. WoH will be, at best, a work-in-progress (WIP); at worst, another joke.

not only is it limited to a mystery list of targeted companies – but they say the company actually has to enroll you for the match. I work for a behemoth company that takes a very dim view of employees forcing their business into a loyalty program – because they assume (correctly) that we don’t always focus on lowest cost.

This is beyond dumb. Also the concierge service that is often mentioned on this blog is only available to lifetime globalists – or to globalists who have completed 60 stays.

Currently I am Hyatt explorist via Mlife gold status match. I called in Wednesday 4/12 because I had a question about using a Club upgrade for my parents. Anyways I asked the agent about how to requalify for explorist next year through Hyatt and she says: “oh you re in luck we have a special promotion where you can qualify til 2019 by staying 10 nites by end of July. Do you want to register for that?”

I just called (800) 233-1234 as listed above. I asked about the quick qualifying offer. The lady didn’t understand and kept asking about something else.
She ended up putting me on hold and she finally put her supervisor on the line. The supervisor signed me up for the quick qualifying offer. So it worked. Thanks for the post.

Update status challenge:
As soon as I finished my stay at a Hyatt property. The next day I received an email with my new status. Challenge ended 6/30/2017.
A couple of days ago I received my card in the mail. Expires 2019.

Jofo: they didn’t tell me anything about qualifying hotels. However before I requested the challenge, I had already made reservations for Hyatt Ziva.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.

Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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